I disagree that all web apps are "objectively worse". I use HackerWeb[1] because I believe it to be better than any of the Android apps I've tried..

[1]http://hackerwebapp.com/

To be perfectly fair, HackerWeb is the best web application I'm terms of cross platform performance I have ever ever seen.

Edit, wait oops I thought you meant http://hn.premii.com but HackerWeb is well done too!

"To be perfectly fair" implies that it shouldn't count. Does the Premii app demonstrate what can be done given the effort?

To achieve those results requires a lot of effort, and hardcore optimisation. Native coding gets you the same results, minus all that effort (as long as you're okay with targeting one platform), so yeah I was sort of saying it doesn't count IMO :)

That said, I'm building all my applications using web tools, Facebooks React allows for some amazing native performance, cross platform! If the views are decoupled enough, you can get two UIs with the exact same logic client and server side, with near native performance to boot.

Now it's not there yet, but it's super close, and once tooling is built up to tackle this use case with the new tech and architecture (client side), then I think it'll be a very big deal!